


all is lost (and all is found)

by firstpynch



Category: Dreamer Trilogy - Maggie Stiefvater, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M, Post-Call Down the Hawk, Post-The Dreamer Trilogy, Post-The Raven King, basically exploring the gangsey's relationship with noah, theory where noah slips from everyone's memories as the ultimate sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:01:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26066917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstpynch/pseuds/firstpynch
Summary: There is a boy in Ronan's dreams.He looked familiar, though Ronan didn’t understand how. As he grew closer to this boy, he saw dark flashes of things he could never explain. Their booth in Nino’s. A second voice singing along to the Murder Squash Song. A tiny frame pressed next to Adam and Blue in the Pig. These were all memories, Ronan knew, and yet they couldn’t be because they were Ronan’s memories. He remembered them clear as day. He knows his memories had no room for a fifth person. In the pre-Henry days, it was just the four of them: Ronan, Adam, Gansey, Blue. The Dreamer, the Magician, the King and the Mirror.So why does this boy feel so familiar?--or, how the gangsey recover their missing piece
Relationships: Noah Czerny & Richard Gansey III & Ronan Lynch & Adam Parrish & Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 4
Kudos: 54





	all is lost (and all is found)

**Author's Note:**

> I reread trc and couldn't shake the idea of everyone forgetting noah in my head. ive been working on this fic for months lmao and if I dont get it out now its gonna stay in my google docs forever
> 
> title from frozen 2 (because why not??)

**_Ronan_ **

There is a boy in Ronan’s dreams. 

His pale face is a stark contrast to the darkness of a forest that looks suspiciously like Cabeswater. There is a thin strip of light coming from somewhere in the corner, away from Ronan’s peripheral vision, and the yellow light is harsh against the boy’s hair, white as snow. He is walking towards Ronan, a boyish spring to his steps that seems to be weighted down by a sag in his shoulders. 

This boy has seen things, Ronan realises. Has seen things and witnessed things and felt things, and none of them are good. His posture is bent with defeat, and Ronan recognises it better than anyone else would. He sees himself in the way this boy stands, as if the burden of memories was too much for either of them to bear. Ronan has had the image of the mangled-up body of his father etched into his eyelids, and he didn’t think he could ever unsee it. Sure, he tried. He memorised the constellation of Adam’s freckles, the way they looked when the sun hit his face just right, the way it revealed the golden streaks in his usually dirt blond hair. He willed himself to remember the playfulness in Adam’s eyes when he smiled, the musical harmony of Adam’s laughter, true and boyish and happy. He tried to remember the way Gansey was always animated when talking about something he loved, the fire in Blue’s eyes as she defended what she thought was right and refused to back down. Even the lucid grin Henry threw his way every time he saw Ronan stare at Adam a little too long, a quite muttered “atta, boy” every time he abruptly pulled Adam away from the group to kiss him senseless. He forced his eyes to project the image of Matthew grinning as he digs into his burger after mass, the way his golden locks fall over his face like a halo. He tried to embed the image of the gang, his friends, his family, curled up around the fire in the Barns – Ronan toasting marshmallows as Matthew snug a few from the packet when he thought no one was looking, Gansey opening up his coat and wrapping it around both himself and Blue, Adam’s leg pressing against Ronan’s, even the image of Declan as he awkwardly tried to make small talk with Gansey and Adam, trying to be better. Ronan was happy, had lots of great moments he would cherish forever, but none chased away the harrowing images of his father’s dead body lying lifelessly on the floor, coated with blood. That loss, that grief, the burden of that image – it is reflected on Ronan’s face, always. Ronan can see the same look on this boy’s face, too. 

As Ronan drew closer to the boy, he could make out faint details about him. His cheekbones were high and prominent, his white hair long and falling over his icy blue eyes. The boy was lean and tall, built in a way that suggested he played sports. And yet, there was a childish nature to him. It was as if someone had flipped a switch just as he was growing up, so that he was forever stuck in a limbo between childhood and adulthood. A man, but not quite. 

The white collar of his shirt had a smear of dirt on it, which looked old, as if he could never quite get it off no matter how many times he washed it. The tie around his neck was loose, but not in a lazy Ronan-like way but as if he had just been wearing it for so long that it came undone by itself. The mysterious light fell on the boy’s jumper, and Ronan could see the Raven crest of Aglionby Academy clear as day. He searched his memory for this boy’s face, but his brain came up with nothing. Just a gap where he could swear something used to be.

_ Who are you?  _ Ronan thought as he approached this boy wearily. 

He looked familiar, though Ronan didn’t understand how. As he grew closer to this boy, he saw dark flashes of things he could never explain. Their booth in Nino’s. A second voice singing along to the Murder Squash Song. A tiny frame pressed next to Adam and Blue in the Pig. These were all memories, Ronan knew, and yet they couldn’t be because they were  _ Ronan’s _ memories. He remembered them clear as day. He knows his memories had no room for a fifth person. In the pre-Henry days, it was just the four of them: Ronan, Adam, Gansey, Blue. The Dreamer, the Magician, the King and the Mirror. 

So why does this boy feel so familiar? 

“Ronan?” a boyish voice said, and it took him a moment to figure out the mystery boy’s lips had moved. “Ronan,” he said again, and Ronan watched as his thin lips formed the ‘o’ in his name, as his teeth jutted out to form the ‘n’. 

When Declan says  _ “Ronan”, _ he means  _ “I see you’ve decided to spend your life doing nothing”,  _ his tone reflecting only exasperation. 

When Gansey says _“Ronan”,_ he means _“please be careful”,_ a brother-like concern. 

When Adam says  _ “Ronan”, _ he means  _ “Ronan”,  _ in a way you could only speak if you knew the other person intimately. 

But when this boy says  _ “Ronan”, _ he means “ _ oh hey man, it’s you.”  _ His tone is laced with familiarity, with belonging and warmth and even love. It was the way Gansey said it - with brotherhood - but also the way Blue said it; with mischief and mirth. His voice lighted a flame of protectiveness in Ronan, akin to the desire to protect Matthew from his darkest secrets, of the panic he had felt when he pulled Blue back before she fell into that hole in Cabeswater, the desperation in hiding epipens everywhere they went just in case Gansey ever needs one. 

Ronan doesn’t know who he is. 

“Ronan,” he says again, reaching his small hands out towards Ronan. 

Ronan finds himself unwittingly raising his own hands, moving towards the boy’s own pale ones. There is a name forming on his lips, right at the edge of his tongue but it’s not coming out. He wills his tongue to roll, to voice what his heart is trying to tell him. 

Their hands draw closer, and Ronan wakes up with a start, a large ball of glass clutched in his hands, snowy glitter floating inside it. 

**_Gansey_ **

Gansey still sometimes hears the voice in his head. 

_ “You will live because of Glendower,” _ he hears them whisper.  _ “Someone on the ley line is dying when they shouldn’t, so you will live when you shouldn’t.”  _

__

As a young kid who had been engulfed by the darkness of death, only to be thrown a lifeline, he had accepted it with open arms. It was his miracle, and he devoted his life to it. He was chosen, and sometimes he wondered if he deserved the generosity the universe had granted him. Someone had died so that he could live, and who was he to be deserving of another’s life? He needed to find Glendower, simply for one reason, to ask one question –  _ why me?  _

__

Gansey thought about the voice a lot, but it was only recently that he started to feel some kind of kinship with this voice. He heard it sometimes, in his head, and he didn’t understand it. He would walk past the large windows in Monmouth and hear an indignant cry of  _ “he threw me out of the fucking window!”  _ but there would be no one around. He would pass the spare room in the apartment and could swear he could hear the low humming of the Murder Squash song, except that would make no sense too because Ronan isn’t here, and who else is mad enough to like that ear-bleeding song if not Ronan Lynch? He would hear a laugh echo in his ears, and he couldn’t work out who it belonged to. 

Except, he could. He knew the voice, because it had been playing in his ears incessantly for seven years. But it was not just that. The voice in his ear was mournful, dark, as if the speaker was bracing himself for an inevitable blow. But the voice he sometimes heard in his lonesome moments – that voice was joy, warmth. It was friendship, it was familial. 

__

Gansey had an aching feeling in his chest, a feeling that told him that there was something he was missing. An ceaseless voice in his head, a constant hum of:  _ Remember him. Remember him. Remember him.  _ The thought skittered right on the edge of the pool of his mind, and yet he couldn’t make it surface. He knew in his heart it’s something he should know,  _ needs _ to know. There was a part of him that was missing – he could feel it. He felt it every time he passed the closed door in Monmouth, barring the entry to a room he doesn’t remember ever using. He felt it every time Henry slid into the seat behind the passenger seat in the Pig, as if the arrangement was all wrong. He felt it every time he looked at the gang (coined the  _ Gangsey _ by Henry in a moment of teenage joy seated around the fire in the Barns), every time they went on one of their trademark hikes, not to look for a long-lost King anymore but to simply have fun. He would always look back at his friends – his family – the leader making sure no one was left behind. He would affectionately roll his eyes at Ronan and Adam bickering in Latin, their hands touching as they walked. He would smile at Blue and Henry debating animatedly about some thing or the other. But then his eyes would dart over the spot next to Blue, and his heart would tell him someone is supposed to be there but isn’t. Gansey loves his friends, this make-shift family he had managed to salvage for himself which felt stronger than blood to him. His worst nightmare is leaving any of them behind, and yet he is always left with the feeling that that is exactly what he has done. 

He has left one of them behind, but he doesn’t know who. 

**+1**

Adam sat on the hard plastic chair of the children’s hospital, wringing his hands nervously on his lap. In front of him, Ronan was pacing back and forth with such force that Adam was mildly surprised he had not worn a hole on the floor. Gansey was trailing Ronan like a confused lost puppy, trying desperately to make him calm down. Adam had not contributed to the efforts; he felt enough nervousness creeping inside him to know telling Ronan to stop would be futile and hypocritical. 

Next to him, Blue was sitting with her side pressed to his, a gesture so familiar and comforting that it brought a sense of normalcy in him. She had her phone out, the fluorescent light of the screen mingling with the one above them, making her screen unseeable. Adam was fairly certain she was updating Henry of the situation; Cheng is on one of his own infamous transatlantic trips he claims is “for business”, but Adam suspects is just an excuse to get away, if his Instagram beach selfies are anything to go by. 

Adam found himself nervously glancing at the clock, and found once again that what had felt like five hours since the last time he checked, was in reality just five mere minutes. 

Ronan’s pacing got more incessant, and Gansey finally gave up, instead flopping down on the seat next to Adam. 

“You okay, tiger?” he asked, his bottom lip nervously caught between his front teeth. It surprised Adam sometimes, seeing these small nervous tips of Gansey’s that only a handful of people in the world were privy to. His round, thick rimmed glasses slid down his face, and he hastily pushed it back up again. 

Adam found himself nodding, though unconvincingly. Gansey could tell, anyway. 

“It will be okay,” he reassures softly. Adam smiles, letting himself stare into the distance once more, all four of them sharing a comfortable silence only people who are so entwined with each other could. 

Adam can’t help but think about the last few years: Harvard had been everything he dreamt of and more. The five of them had all been nervous separating into the wider world: the experiences they all shared made them wonder if there is even a place for them. But there is, there was, and there always will be. And once all the problems had gone away - Moderators and hunt for dreamers and looking over their shoulder every day - they had finally been able to just  _ be _ . Gansey’s presence - as a freshman - in Adam’s sophomore year had relaxed him a bit. He had a great group of friends in college he loved very much, but no one could replace what Gansey is to him: a brother. And after college, when Adam had moved to D.C. to go to Georgetown Law School, Ronan had come with him. 

And so, Adam had been incessantly and deliciously happy. 

He got to have the life he had dreamt about in his lonely moments in the trailer park: a group of friends with whom he belongs, a partner he loves with all his heart and is loved in return, success and fulfilment. By the time Adam had woken up one morning in their D.C. apartment to Ronan clutching a small, elegant band in his fists - a magnificent dream, like everything Ronan does is - Adam had finally convinced himself that he deserves it. 

And that is how they ended where they are now: the waiting room at a children’s hospital, eagerly waiting for the news they had been chasing for months now. 

It hadn’t taken them long after their wedding to broach the subject of kids. Ronan wanted them - Ronan had always wanted them, and Adam knew that. And Adam himself had changed over the years, had finally let himself believe that he is not Robert Parrish, that there is no defect in him that renders him unable to be a father. 

They had decided to adopt, because both he and Ronan knew intimately the damage done to children in bad homes. Adam still woke up from nightmares of his father’s fists, after all, and he works at a firm specialising in child and domestic abuse cases, sees the same haunted look in the faces of hundreds of children, which he himself used to wear, and Ronan is reminded of Adam’s scars everytime he sees Adam shift uncomfortably around people who approach him from his left side. 

They had waited months to be matched. In the meantime, they had done all they could on their side. They moved back into the Barns - because there was no other place they could ever intend to be their family home - and baby proofed it one memorable afternoon when the whole house had been flooded with people: Henry and Blue arguing animatedly about how to read instructions whilst Gansey timidly tried to play referee, Matthew and Hennessey painting the room a soothing shade of neutral grey-green - green because Blue refused to  _ let my godchild be forced to conform to society’s heteronormative expectations of gender, goddamit,  _ and neutral (despite Gansey’s insistence on yellow because it is “sunny”) because Declan insisted the colour needs to be soft so that  _ my niece or nephew isn’t blinded every time they open their eyes, jesus!  _ Jordan stood on a tall dream ladder that automatically adjusts its height, painstakingly painting little constellations with glow-in-the-dark paint. Declan and Ronan had locked themselves into one of the outer barns all morning, apparently trying to make a crib themselves. Adam had surveyed all these images, like frozen tableaus, and felt a warmth spread over his heart, a gentle humming that felt oddly like Cabeswater whispering in his deaf ear. It repeated one word over and over again:  _ Mine.  _

When they had finally received a call about a newborn baby boy found abandoned on the edge of a forest just outside Henrietta - on St Mark’s Eve, no less - it had felt like a sign. 

And so here they were, six hours after the call that had Adam and Ronan scrambling into their trusty BMW, Adam calling Gansey on the way as Ronan sped to the hospital well above the speed limit, and Adam let him. Gansey and Blue’s apartment was closer to the DC hospital than Adam and Ronan were, and the couple were already there when Adam and Ronan arrived, looking harried and joyful. Here they were, sitting together like a unit of support, because many things may have changed in their lives, but their dependence on each other never would. 

The baby - their baby - was found a little hypothermic, being out in the woods as long as he was on a chilly night, and Adam is filled with a terror that feels as old as life itself. 

Finally,  _ finally _ , the door opens, and a nurse comes out, the weariness of a 3am shift etched on her face, but wearing a gleeful smile nonetheless. 

“Mr Parrish-Lynch?” she asks, and Adam shoots up his seat almost as quickly as Ronan rushes over. Their hands immediately find each other without looking, Adam giving a tiny squeeze to still Ronan’s shaking hands. “Your son is ready to see you.” 

Adam feels as if all the air is punched out of his chest. 

_ Their son.  _

He and Ronan walk into the room together hand-in-hand with shaky steps. Gansey and Blue hesitate outside for only a moment, before following them swiftly, a family all anxiously waiting to meet their newest addition. 

Another nurse is inside, holding a swaddle of blankets. Ronan reaches them first, holding out his hand and gently cradling the baby to his chest. It should look weird - Ronan, all dark edges and sharp smirks, holding something that could so easily break - but it isn’t. Not to Adam, not to Gansey, not to Blue. They have all seen the tenderness with which Ronan held that baby mouse to his face a lifetime ago, the first time Adam had felt something stirring in his chest. They had all seen Ronan’s tenderness with Matthew, and never-ending patience with Opal. Adam was intimately familiar with Ronan’s soft touches, with the love that pours out of Ronan in waves. 

Seeing Ronan cradle their newborn son in his arms is the most natural thing in the world. 

Ronan’s eyes finally tear away from their son’s face to look at Adam, with so much love that Adam feels like he is sixteen years old again, being kissed by a magical boy in a magical house for the first time and feeling something inside him unravel. 

It’s not until he sees Ronan’s face wet with tears that he realises he is crying too. There is something complicated on Ronan’s face. The happiness is there, clear as day, but there is something else too. Nostalgia. Disbelief. Grief. 

Ronan’s hands hold out their baby, and Adam wordlessly cups him, hugging him as he gently sways. He looks down to see his son’s face for the first time, little wisps of light blond hair sticking out from under the blanket, large light blue eyes - so light it looks almost silver - with feathers of fine hair that casts soft shadows on his cheeks when he blinks. There’s a tiny mark on his left cheek, and Adam finds himself softly caressing it in a motion that feels oddly familiar. 

Adam stares at his son for a long, long moment, and missing parts of him finally clicks into place. 

Gansey and Blue walk over just then, peering over Adam’s arm, all their faces doing something complicated Adam still can’t fully decipher.

“What’s his name?” Gansey finally asks, voice trailing off as if he is unsure of the question, but as if he already knows the answer. 

Adam gulps, looking over to where Ronan is staring with shiny eyes. They share a look, and understanding dawns on both of them. 

“Noah,” Adam says, and just like that, the final piece of the puzzle slots into place. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> SOOOOOOO!! Theories? is baby pynch noah reborn? is he just a baby that reminds them of noah? your guess is as good as mine. 
> 
> hope y'all enjoyed!! 
> 
> sorry for skipping blue's pov. I just couldn't hack it and it was stressing me out 
> 
> scream at me on Tumblr: firstpynch


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